My OB Said WHAT???

I have just discovered (with thanks to Alicia of Tattoos And Drool) the fabulous site, My OB Said What???.

Full of gems such as…
“Your Cervix Is a Little Dehydrated”
“The Vagina is a Very Dirty Place for a Baby!”
And my personal favourite, regarding the DANGERS of birthing in a standing position:
“…It Makes All The Blood Rush Down Into Your Vagina.”

I have had one entirely midwife cared birth, where I don’t remember seeing an OB once during my entire pregnancy, labour and post-partum care. Then my second where my entire antenatal care was done via an OB, who didn’t believe me when I told him as I was being hooked up to the Picotin that I was going to give birth at 3:09pm, bid me farewell, said he had some places to go and that he’d see me around six. So instead of birthing my son when he entered the world at exactly 3:09pm he was off gallivanting around town, leaving a superb midwife (and I feel so terrible that I can’t even remember her name now) and my husband to play catcher. Of course he showed up just after my son had been taken in a little oxygen bubble to the neonatal care and I had birthed the placenta, to tell me I’d done a fabulous job, and that I owed him $2,000.

Oddly enough I can’t think of any gems that he said. My main memory of my care was an almost creepy obsession with ultrasounds, every single visit I’d hop up on the table and have an ultrasound, it was quite a novelty at first but after so many you start to wonder what the point is, maybe he was trying to justify that $2k by showing off his flashy equipment.

My gem surprisingly come from my midwife care. At 38(ish) weeks after spending the entire day with either end over a toilet and complaining of backache, timing contractions and laying in the bath to see if they were valid or not, they eventually became 6 minutes or so apart and so we phoned up the birth centre and were told to come in straight away.

I explained my day to the midwife on duty (who, from now on, will be referred to as Nurse Satan), said that the contractions were slowly, but steadily getting closer together and I could feel definite pressure on my cervix.

“Hah! How do you even know where your cervix is?”

Strike one.

Last I checked lady, it was somewhere up my vag, unless I’ve been horribly confused all these years.

So I lay down on the bed, she berates me for drinking lime cordial instead of water and does a cervical check to see how far along I am. Only 1cm. She laughs and says the next thing that will stick in my mind forever.

“You’re not in labour, come back when you’re screaming!”

Strike 2.

So off we go back home, I take the prescribed sleeping pills which last all of an hour before my waters break all over our bed and we jump back into the car and go back to the birth centre, under their instructions to come in as soon as my membranes rupture to prevent any infection.

That was Wednesday night. It’s thought I’ll go into full blown labour within 24 hours so they just let me sit it out, eventually a doctor comes to see me on Friday, explains that I have an unresponsive cervix and I’ll be scheduled for an induction on Monday, but my body will probably figure out what to do before then anyway.

Monday comes, I’m hooked up to the IV, a couple of hours pass by and I’m in the throes of a unmedicated induced labour, in pops Nurse Satan.

“Oh, it’s you! Now you KNOW you’re in labour!”

Strike three.

That was when I turned around to my midwife and told her that if Nurse Satan came into the birthing room ever again I was going to impale her on an IV stand. She was informed of my feelings towards her and kept out for the entirety of my eldest son’s birth. I saw her occasionally in the hallway for my short stay after birth and she refused to even make eye contact with me.

So, it isn’t just the OBs who are completely lacking in bedside manner or even just manners in general, occasionally you’ll get a complete nutjob midwife too. Infact, remind me to one day tell you about the midwife from my second pregnancy who would use the room with the long term care patients as her bedbound bitching audience. Apparently she hated birthing Asian babies because “the mother’s vagina always smells of curry”.  Rarely a shift went by without her coming in to moan about “the smelly woman in room 16a” or “that fat one down the hall”. Delightful.